Intelligence Director Warns of Cybersecurity Threats

Director of Intelligence James Clapper began his worldwidethreat assessment to the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday by outlining thethreats of cyberattacks.

While he said there is only a "remote" chance thatthere will be a cyberattack on critical U.S. infrastructure in the next twoyears that would result in wide-scale disruption, but that doesn't mean stateactors, or nonstate actors, might not deploy less sophisticated attacks.

Clapper said there was increasing risk to that criticalinfrastructure from such attacks, which could have significant impact.

Among his other concerns are spies penetrating computer netsand getting access to both unclassified and classified material; industrialespionage; threats by China, Russia, Iran and others; the multistakeholdermodel of Internet governance; and hacktivists and cybercriminals.

"Most hacktivists use short-term denial-of-service operationsor expose personally identifiable information held by target companies, asforms of political protest," he said in his testimony. "However, amore radical group might form to inflict more systemic impacts -- such asdisrupting financial networks -- or accidentally trigger unintendedconsequences that could be misinterpreted as a state-sponsored attack."

Clapper also pointed to toolkits on the black market, andthe open market, for breaking into networks. "These hardware and softwarepackages can give governments and cybercriminals the capability to steal,manipulate, or delete information on targeted systems."

The president this week is meeting with members of the Houseand Senate. Among the topics of conversation will be his push for bipartisancybersecurity legislation to backstop his executive order on informationsharing and a best-practices cybersecurity framework.

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